Fafnir

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Fáfnir — anglicised Fafnir — is a figure of Norse legend: the keeper of a cursed treasure who took the form of a serpent to guard it, and was slain by the young hero Sigurd. He belongs to the Völsung cycle, the body of Germanic heroic legend preserved chiefly in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Völsunga saga and in the older poems of the Poetic Edda, especially the Fáfnismál.

In the saga he begins not as a monster but as a son. Fáfnir, his brother Regin, and a third brother named Otr are the children of Hreidmar. When the god Loki kills Otr — caught in the shape of an otter — the gods must pay a ransom in gold, and Loki extorts the hoard of the dwarf Andvari to settle it, taking even the ring the dwarf begs to keep. Andvari lays a curse on the gold: it will destroy whoever holds it. The story bears this out at once. Fáfnir murders his father for the treasure, drives Regin out, and withdraws to the heath of Gnitaheiðr, where greed works on him until he becomes a great serpent or dragon — in the older sources the line between the two is not sharp — coiled upon the gold he will share with no one.

Regin, nursing the grudge and wanting the hoard himself, fosters Sigurd and goads him to the killing. On Odin’s advice Sigurd digs a pit in the path the serpent takes to water and strikes upward as it passes over him, piercing it from beneath. The dying Fáfnir and Sigurd exchange words — the serpent warns him that the gold is fated to be his bane — and when Sigurd roasts the dragon’s heart and tastes the blood on his thumb, he suddenly understands the speech of birds, who tell him that Regin means to betray him.

The episode is among the most widely depicted in early Germanic art: the dragon-slaying, the roasting of the heart, and the speaking birds appear on carved stones and church portals across Scandinavia and the British Isles, evidence that the legend was known far beyond the surviving texts. Scholarship treats Fáfnir as legendary rather than historical, and reads the cursed hoard as a recurring motif in Germanic story rather than a record of events; the relation of the saga to the older Eddic poems, and of both to lost oral tradition, remains a working problem.

The matter passed into later imagination through these medieval sources. Richard Wagner reshaped the dwarf-turned-dragon as Fafner in his Ring cycle, and the guarded hoard, the slaying from below, and the dragon’s blood became fixed elements of how the figure is remembered. What the early texts hold to is plainer than the retellings: a creature made monstrous by what it would not let go.

→ Related: Nerthus